25th hour, by spike lee

After a brief hiatus, film club was able to resume this week, and we picked up where we left off, specifically with Spike Lee. Our choice this week was 25th Hour (2002).

Like Do the Right Thing before it, 25th Hour can be read as a long exercise in the practice of empathy. The two take pretty different approaches, though. Do the Right Thing introduces a wide variety of characters and places them in interpersonal conflict—since all of them, on one level or another, can be thought of sympathetically, we (can) watch these conflicts with a degree of empathy towards all parties involved. 25th Hour avoids this method: opting instead to work with a smaller palette of characters, and to ratchet the interpersonal conflicts way down—the main characters are not individuals forced to interact by the dictates of neighborhood geography but rather a set of old friends. (It's true that their long-running friendship is accompanied by the usual long-running suppressed resentments, and also true that these resentments bubble over into outright hostility at times, but this is still a far cry from the screaming-fights-in-the-street that punctuate Do the Right Thing.)

The primary way Lee elicits our empathy here, then, is through showing us sympathetic characters in conflict not with one another but in conflict with an impartial State. It's not for no reason that our protagonist, Edward Norton's Montgomery Brogan, has a Cool Hand Luke poster up in his apartment:

Monty, we learn fairly early, is a drug dealer, and although he's got a whole set of fairly reasonable—or at least symapthetic—reasons for getting into the drug dealing business, he learns pretty quickly (once nabbed by the DEA), that there's a whole set of Statist mechanisms in place, the Rockefeller Laws, that are designed to render these motivations pretty much meaningless, in the pursuit of impartiality. He learns about these laws in this room, production-designed to be the very picture of Impartial Objectivity in action:

The other primary character who's up against Impartial Law is high school English teacher Jacob Elinksy, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Grade A squirrelly repressed weirdo mode. What Elinsky wants / doesn't want, is to sleep with his student, Mary D'Annunzio:

She's 17, so sleeping with her would be statutory rape, but the film takes pains to make the point that Mary is not exactly the portrait of untrammeled innocence:

Of course, that doesn't matter, in the eyes of the Law (whether it should or should not is another question all together). Point is, the film rather daringly asks us, for over two hours, to extend our sympathies to what we'd traditionally think of as the lowest of society's lows: a (convicted) drug dealer and a (potential) statutory rapist. An exercise in empathy indeed. It helps, of course, not only that Lee provides them with motivating backstories (Brogan more so than Elinsky) but also that they are articulate, intelligent white dudes... whether this is intended as subtle commentary by Lee is anybody's guess.

So the film wants us to expand our own empathy, to get it broad enough to the point where it can include these two. This transition is mirrored by an expansion of empathy taking place in Monty's own sensorium over the course of the film. On his last night of freedom, Monty is inspired by a piece of bathroom graffiti ("Fuck You") to embark upon a monologue reminiscent of both the inflammatory invective in Do the Right Thing and Travis Bickle's diary-rants in Taxi Driver (1976). Monty's monologue is surprisingly completist; stereotyping nearly every ethnic group in the city:

This is significant, because it's precisely this crazy-diverse panoply of New Yorkers who Monty will be separated from when he's imprisoned the next morning: the hell of imprisonment is precisely the hell of being separated from the richness of an everyday experience involving others. Monty eventually learns this, towards the film's final moments, but not before he's gone through a set of transformative experiences. As Monty suffers, he learns. (My film club compatriot, Skunkcabbage, argues that this is the key to the 9/11 imagery that circulates within this film: that Monty's suffering is an allegory for America's, and that Monty's epiphany—that the world contains others, and that his comfort is predicated at least partially on the suffering of others—could be the same epiphany that a post-9/11 America could, optimistically, reach.)

Two final notes:

1. This film may represent part of Lee's effort to increase his own personal empathy: there are times when he seems to have set himself a project of making at least one film about every ethnic subculture in New York. Summer of Sam (1999) is Lee's "Italian" film; this one is his "Irish" film.... [?]

2. All this empathy-building aside, there's still a Monstrous Other in this film, specifically the other convicts that presumably lie in wait for Edward Norton to join them. The specter of homosexual jail-rape is evoked about every ten minutes in this film, with both suicide and disfigurement being raised as potentially desirable alternatives. The film's moving final sequence presents a narrative bifurcation—two possible paths—were I to cynically reduce this bifurcation to a formula it would be "Americana Vs. Male Rape."

malcolm x, by spike lee

For our film club this week, we decided to stick with the Spike Lee trajectory begun last week, and so we watched his terrific, uncompromising biopic Malcolm X (1992), which I'd not seen before.

On one level, the film is an extended examination of persuasion: specifically, it looks at the difference between persuasion and coercion.

Persuasion can be powerful, but when power itself is the means of persuasion we cross a line into coercion. The film is very interested in how people and institutions weild power, as it announces baldly in its opening juxtaposition:

The Rodney King tape is, of course, among some of the most iconic coercive footage ever shot, but the early portion of the film has no shortage of additional examples. For instance, here's someone making a point to Malcolm's mother:

And here's someone making a point to the young Malcolm himself:

These experiences are illuminating; they inform a person how power works, how to establish your place in hierarchies founded upon dominance. The young Malcolm learns this lesson well, as we can see from the way he settles a dispute early in the film:

So, on one level, the story of Malcolm's development is a story of renouncing coercion in favor of persuasion: doing work through lectures and argument, using the intellect as the tool rather than the body (or a club, or a gun):

The film is at its most interesting, however, when it blurs the dividing line between these two modes. The turning point in Malcolm's experience, as readers of the Autobiography will know, is his stint in prison and subsequent conversion to Islam. In the film, the catalyst for this is a mentor figure named Baines (invented for the film), who steers Malcolm, with a firm hand, to some tools of intellectual power:

The experience is undoubtedly positive for Malcolm—but as with any mentorship, it is not free of hierarchy, and it comes with its own dynamic of dominance and submission (the sequence culminates with a resistant Malcolm learning to kneel in submission before Allah). The difference would appear to be that the submission here, ultimately, is given voluntarily, without threat of force, but the territory is getting tricky all of a sudden.

Even more interesting is the sequence when one of the Nation of Islam brothers is injured by police and taken to prison without medical care. Malcolm goes to the police station and demands to be taken to see the injured party. The police consent, but it certainly helps that Malcolm has this force waiting outside:

Is this coercive? Is it the threat of violence that these ranked men (might) represent that causes the police to submit to Malcolm's request? Is it morally right to use coercion to save a man's life?

Further complicating this scene is the fact that the Nation of Islam members, in fact, act as a restraint on the even more coercive force represented by an inflamed crowd of people who gather outside of the hospital, demanding justice:

Cops, a black man wounded by those same cops, and an angry mob: this is the same formula we have at the conclusion of Do the Right Thing, and it is precisely the addition of the Nation of Islam members that allows the scenario to be reimagined as triumph rather than as tragedy. Whether this is because they represent reason instead of force or reason in addition to force is perhaps the key question involved with understanding Malcolm X, the figure. The film, to its credit, provides no easy answer.

do the right thing, by spike lee

After last week—in which our two-man film club looked at Mathieu Kassovitz's depiction of culture and tension in the Parisian banlieues—it seemed only appropriate to move on to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), still one of the best films ever made about urban life.

The first shot in the film (not counting the nondigetic "Fight the Power" dance sequence) opens in a radio DJ's booth and slowly pulls back, out through the window, to end here:

The final shot in the film (not counting the nondigetic still photo of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X ) is this:

These two shots roughly establish our narrative environment—the built world of our film, to stick with the terminology I was using on Saturday. One of the many strokes of genius in this film is that Lee keeps his world essentially narrow: everything that occurs in the film occurs within walking distance of everything else. Lee not only narrows the scope in terms of space, but also in terms of time—the entire narrative takes place in a single 24-hour period.

By resisting the temptations of going wide, Lee is able to go deep: he crams the world of the film with at least 20 characters who recur throughout the course of the day. Even the more minor characters are incredibly well-realized and vivid, bordering on the indelible. If you've seen the film, you probably remember many of them:

By packing many different characters into the narrow space-time frame of the film, the end result is density. I can think of only precious few films that approach or supersede this one in terms of narrative density (you could make a good argument for Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), a film a little broader in the time dimension, but even more narrow in the spatial dimension). This density yields a sense that the world is a layered sheaf of simultaneous narratives—precisely the sensation that emerges when one is alert to life in an urban environment (or a globalized world). (As an aside, it's also the experience I've been trying to capture in my own creative writing (Exhibit A, Exhibit B).)

This alertness, if approached compassionately, can give rise to a deep understanding of / sympathy to the nature and motives of others, and Lee not only possesses this understanding, but has effectively transferred it to the screen. Every character in this film, from Spike Lee's own deliveryman alter ego all the way down to the thuggish white cops, is both sympathetic and flawed. In giving over the entire run-time of his film to having sympathetic (yet flawed) characters observe, comment upon, and ultimately clash against the flaws of the other (sympathetic) characters, Lee nails the way that conflict—and tragedy—can emerge even when everyone involved imagines their own motivations to be morally justified (hence the title). This is the human dilemma, captured precisely, elegantly, and succinctly. As fine a piece of moral art as anyone could ever wish for.

Skunkcabbage's write-up (contains spoilers!) is here.